Airbags and vehicles are used for increasing the driving safety of the occupants and are typically designed so that they are expanded at high velocity in the event of an accident, in order to form a soft cushion between the surroundings and the vehicle occupants. While emphasis was placed on the driver airbag or passenger airbag as the frontal airbag upon the introduction of airbags, manifold further areas of application have become known in the meantime. For example, airbags are also used as side impact protection units, the airbag being extended between the vehicle occupant and a side wall of the vehicle, in order to reduce accident consequences of laterally colliding vehicles or of rollovers of one's own vehicle. Airbags of this type for a side impact protection unit are often integrated in the vehicle seat of the vehicle, because in this form of integration the airbag is carried along with the vehicle seat when the seat is displaced to set the distance between driver and steering wheel or also to set the footwell size in the vehicle longitudinal direction.
An airbag of this type is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,678,853. This publication describes an airbag system, the gas generator and the airbag being situated in the side area of the vehicle seat. Upon an expansion of the airbag, a seam is opened as the target weakened area and the airbag can expand at the predetermined position. In order to support the opening of the seam, the airbag and the gas generator are situated in a type of envelope, which is fixed in the vehicle seat at a position opposite to the seam. The envelope cannot yield unpredictably upon the expansion of the airbag due to the fixing, so that the expansion precision is increased.
US 2004/0130130 A1 describes a similar system, an envelope of the airbag being sewn on both sides to the covering of the vehicle seat, so that upon an expansion of the airbag, firstly the envelope is pressed apart and thus also the seam is opened in order to allow the airbag to expand outward.
EP 1657126 A2, which forms the closest prior art, also describes an airbag configuration for a vehicle seat, in this embodiment, a strip being sewn in the area of the seam of the vehicle seat, which is connected on the opposite side to the fixed structure of the vehicle seat. Upon an expansion of the airbag, the strip prevents elastic yielding of the seam outward and is instead used as a type of tear strip, which opens the seam in order to permit the airbag to expand outward.
The invention is based at least one object of proposing an airbag configuration for a vehicle seat and a corresponding vehicle seat, which allow a high level of expansion kinematics of the airbag.